When Saab Owners Tried to Buy the Company: The Forgotten Rescue Saab Campaign

Saab Automobile has not operated as a conventional automaker since its December 2011 bankruptcy, while the company’s unusually long financial unwinding continued for another decade. The bankruptcy proceedings were eventually completed, and the final distributions were made in 2022 – a conclusion covered at the time by SaabPlanet and documented in detail by the Swedish National Debt Office.

The intervening years have made the final Saab chronology familiar: General Motors decided to sell, Koenigsegg negotiated and withdrew, Spyker completed the acquisition, Chinese financing proposals failed, production stopped, Saab entered bankruptcy, and NEVS acquired most of the principal assets.

Yet one of the earliest rescue proposals appeared before those negotiations had developed into a recognizable sale process.

It did not originate in Trollhättan, Detroit, Stockholm, or an investment bank. It came from three men connected with an authorized Saab dealership in Dresden, Germany. Their proposal was to organize Saab owners worldwide, ask them to contribute money, and eventually give them a financial interest in the company they were attempting to save.

The project was called Rescue Saab.

It was easy to dismiss as unrealistic – and its founders openly acknowledged that it sounded unrealistic. But in early 2009, it attracted thousands of supporters within days, reached more than 80 countries, and briefly presented a question that no conventional bidder could answer as convincingly:

How much was Saab’s unusually committed owner base actually worth?

Saab Entered Reconstruction, and Dresden Responded

On February 20, 2009, Saab Automobile applied for restructuring under Sweden’s Company Reorganization Act at the District Court of Vänersborg. The process protected the company from creditors while management attempted to separate Saab from General Motors and establish it as an independent business capable of attracting investment.

The later European Commission decision concerning Sweden’s state guarantee recorded that Saab entered restructuring on February 20 and remained in the process until August 20, 2009. The restructuring included a composition agreement that reduced debts incurred before the filing by 75 percent.

Almost immediately, a new website appeared under the address rescue-saab.com.

The initiative came from mobilforum Dresden, an authorized Saab dealership. Contemporary coverage identified the three men behind the campaign as Tobias Kaboth, Michael Hesse, and Carsten Seifert – the same three men seen in the surviving campaign photograph standing in front of a Saab 9-3 showroom display.

Norwegian automotive publication BilNorge identified them from left to right, while Göteborgs-Posten reported that the website had been started by the three Dresden residents and used the Obama-inspired slogan:

“Saab we can believe in.”

Kaboth, the dealership’s managing director, explained that customers had been calling repeatedly as reports about Saab’s possible closure intensified. They wanted the latest information, but many also told the dealership that they could not identify another manufacturer whose cars they would accept as a replacement.

That response was familiar to Saab dealers. What was different was the Dresden team’s decision to treat it as something that could be organized and measured.

During what the organizers described as a late-night brainstorming session, they developed the idea of creating an international association large enough to demonstrate that Saab still possessed a committed market – even if GM no longer wanted to finance it.

As Heise reported at the time, Kaboth and the other enthusiasts established Rescue Saab e.V. and created an English-language website intended to reach Saab owners beyond Germany.

It Was Not Intended to Be Another Petition

The initial public-facing stage was simple. Visitors registered their names and email addresses to show that a worldwide Saab constituency still existed.

Göteborgs-Posten reported that the website had recorded more than 4,000 supporters in slightly less than three days. BilNorge published its report one day later and said the total was already approaching 10,000. The difference reflects how quickly the counter was moving rather than a fundamental contradiction between the reports.

Registration, however, was only the first part of the proposal.

According to the campaign material preserved by the Latvian Saab Club, participants would eventually be able to join Rescue Saab by paying between €50 and €500. If the association helped complete a purchase of Saab, the contributors were supposed to receive shares or warrants in proportion to the amount they had paid.

The organizers said that an escrow account would be established under legal supervision. A lawyer identified as Martin Adam and corporate consultant Mathias Oldenburg were named as advisers responsible for the legal and financial framework. If the campaign failed to collect enough money or could not participate in an acquisition, contributors were promised refunds.

That claim requires careful wording today.

The escrow structure was described by the campaign itself and repeated in contemporary reporting. No independently available documentation confirms that the proposed account was opened, that substantial contributions were deposited, or that securities were ever issued.

The distinction between supporters and paying members is equally important. The rapidly increasing counter recorded people willing to associate their names with the campaign. It did not show that each registrant had transferred €50, €500, or any money at all.

Rescue Saab was therefore not an equity crowdfunding operation in the later, regulated meaning of the term. It was an attempt to create the organization first and determine the viable financial structure afterward.

Even so, the timing was remarkable. The Rescue Saab campaign appeared in February 2009, while Kickstarter did not officially launch until April 28, 2009. The Dresden group was already discussing pooled online contributions, international participation, and financial rights before modern crowdfunding had become a recognizable business category.

More Than 6,000 Supporters and 40,000 Visits Within Days

The early response exceeded what the organizers expected.

A February 25 report from Motorsport-Total stated that more than 6,000 people had registered, while the website had received over 40,000 visits from 81 countries. Tobias Kaboth said the provisional site would need to be revised as the audience continued to grow.

Other contemporary counters captured different stages:

• More than 2,000 names after just over two days, according to Svenska Dagbladet.
• More than 4,000 after slightly less than three days, according to Göteborgs-Posten.
• Nearly 8,000 by February 25, according to Realtid.
• Close to 10,000 after approximately three days, according to BilNorge.

These figures originated largely from the organizers or the website’s visible counter rather than an external audit. They should not be treated as verified financial commitments. They do, however, show that Rescue Saab became an international campaign almost immediately.

Support was reportedly strongest in Sweden, followed by Germany and the United States. The campaign also claimed interest from Saab employees, clubs, and dealers – a particularly important detail because those groups represented more than symbolic online traffic. They held workshop knowledge, customer relationships, parts networks, and direct experience of Saab’s shrinking but still active market.

The organizers also pursued celebrity endorsements. The preserved press release named German television personalities Stefan Raab and Bastian Pastewka, along with Bill Gates, Stephen King, and Jay Leno, as prominent Saab drivers the campaign intended to contact.

There is no reliable evidence that any of those people formally endorsed Rescue Saab or contributed financially. Their inclusion shows how the organizers hoped to move the campaign from an enthusiast initiative into mainstream business coverage.

Could Two Tanks of Fuel Have Bought Saab?

The campaign’s most memorable calculation came from the attempt to translate Saab’s estimated purchase price into an amount ordinary owners could understand.

Carsten Seifert told Realtid that the organizers believed buying Saab might require approximately SEK 1.7 billion to SEK 2.2 billion.

Instead of searching for one investor capable of providing that amount, Rescue Saab looked at the estimated number of Saab owners worldwide.

The campaign calculated that there were approximately 1.5 million Saab owners. If each contributed the equivalent of two tanks of fuel – then estimated at SEK 1,200 to SEK 1,400 – the resulting fund would contain between SEK 1.8 billion and SEK 2.1 billion.

On paper, that placed the worldwide owner base inside the campaign’s estimated purchase-price range.

It was effective campaign arithmetic. A corporate acquisition requiring two billion kronor sounded inaccessible; two routine fuel stops did not.

The calculation also revealed why the proposal was unlikely to become a serious bid.

It assumed participation from an enormous proportion of the global Saab population. The organizers would have needed to reach owners in dozens of legal jurisdictions, verify members, process international payments, define voting and ownership rights, comply with securities regulations, and complete everything within the timetable imposed by GM’s sale process.

The difference between 10,000 registered supporters and 1.5 million paying participants was the difference between an impressive international campaign and acquisition finance.

Even at the highest proposed contribution, 10,000 members paying €500 each would have generated €5 million. At the €50 minimum, the same membership would have produced €500,000.

Both amounts could have supported a campaign or contributed alongside a larger investor. Neither was sufficient to acquire, separate, and recapitalize Saab Automobile.

Purchasing Saab Was Only the First Expense

The campaign’s purchase-price calculation did not address the larger cost of operating the company after acquisition.

A buyer would need more than money for GM’s shares. Saab required working capital, supplier confidence, production financing, warranty provisions, continued product development, regulatory certification, and agreements covering technology still owned or controlled by GM.

The real negotiations later demonstrated that complexity.

In June 2009, GM issued a letter of intent to sell Saab to a group led by Koenigsegg. The proposed transaction required negotiations involving Saab, Koenigsegg, GM, the European Investment Bank, the Swedish government, and the Swedish National Debt Office.

The Koenigsegg group withdrew in November. SaabPlanet later revisited the failed deal through Christian von Koenigsegg’s own comments, while the Debt Office’s official timeline records how the guarantee negotiations were suspended and then resumed when Spyker emerged as a potential buyer.

GM announced on December 18, 2009, that Saab would be wound down, although it remained open to revised offers.

Spyker eventually completed its acquisition on February 23, 2010, supported by a government-guaranteed European Investment Bank facility. SaabPlanet reported the completion of the transaction in “Spyker Cars Finalized the Purchase of Saab”.

A community association could not easily reproduce that industrial, governmental, and legal machinery.

The founders of Rescue Saab appear to have understood this. Their preserved statement conceded that forming an association and building a website would not be sufficient to purchase an automaker. The most realistic outcome was for Rescue Saab to support a properly funded investor, contribute whatever capital it could collect, and provide direct customer knowledge.

In other words, the association’s practical value was not as Saab’s sole buyer. It was as proof that a potential buyer would inherit an unusually organized customer base.

The Campaign Continued Beyond Its First Week

Rescue Saab did not disappear when its first burst of media attention passed.

By December 2009, Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet reported that almost 18,000 people had joined the campaign. That figure was still based on campaign registrations rather than audited financial participation, but it showed that the initiative retained visibility through the end of GM’s sale process.

The most visible later gesture was a large light projection on a wall at Saab’s Trollhättan factory.

Sveriges Radio reported that the projected image carried the “Rescue Saab” message and consisted of 3,600 photographs of Saab enthusiasts and Saab models, arranged to form a larger image of a Saab.

That mosaic expressed the campaign’s central argument more effectively than its financial projections. Saab’s market was not simply a sales total on GM’s balance sheet. It was a distributed network of owners, employees, dealers, clubs, workshops, and specialists who could be made visible when the company’s future was threatened.

The same capacity for rapid organization became even clearer after GM announced the wind-down.

In January 2010, an estimated 10,000 Saab cars participated in approximately 70 support convoys worldwide. SaabPlanet documented those demonstrations in “10,000 Cars in Convoys for Saab”.

Rescue Saab did not organize every convoy, and the two efforts should not be treated as a single campaign. They grew from the same international infrastructure: national Saab clubs, internet forums, dealers, repair specialists, local organizers, and owners accustomed to exchanging information across borders.

Saab Was Sold, but the Underlying Problem Remained

Spyker’s purchase temporarily answered the question that had produced Rescue Saab.

Production continued, the new 9-5 reached customers, the 9-4X entered production in Mexico, and Saab presented a future product plan built around the PhoeniX architecture. For a time, the company had escaped GM’s wind-down.

What it did not have was a sufficiently durable financial base.

Supplier payment disputes repeatedly interrupted production during 2011. Proposed arrangements involving Hawtai, Pang Da, and Youngman failed to deliver a structure acceptable to every party whose approval was required – especially GM, which still controlled important technology rights.

Saab Automobile filed for bankruptcy on December 19, 2011.

In June 2012, the receivers agreed to sell most of the assets of Saab Automobile, Saab Automobile Tools, and Saab Automobile Powertrain to National Electric Vehicle Sweden, or NEVS. The spare-parts company was excluded and later came under Swedish state ownership.

NEVS briefly restarted production of Saab-badged 9-3 sedans, but it did not reconstruct Saab Automobile as the company Rescue Saab had attempted to preserve.

The bankruptcy remained open for years. Its final stage is covered in SaabPlanet’s report on the end of the bankruptcy procedure and the later account of the final payments.

What Rescue Saab Understood Correctly

There is no evidence that Rescue Saab submitted a formal multibillion-krona bid, became a significant shareholder, or collected capital capable of influencing GM’s decision.

Its proposed financial structure remained incomplete. The participation figures were self-reported. Registration required far less commitment than transferring money. The projected purchase price did not include the full cost of separating Saab from GM and operating the company afterward.

Judged purely as acquisition finance, the campaign failed.

Judged as an assessment of Saab’s owner community, it was considerably more accurate.

The three men in Dresden understood that Saab possessed something difficult to record in quarterly sales reports: customers who did not behave as passive consumers once production was threatened.

That behavior became increasingly important after the company disappeared. Owners preserved technical documentation, established model registers, reproduced unavailable components, repaired electronic modules, funded specialist tooling, maintained diagnostic knowledge, rescued historically significant cars, and supported independent workshops long after the factory stopped supplying new vehicles.

Rescue Saab tried to convert that behavior into a corporate ownership structure before online crowdfunding platforms, international community financing, and digital membership tools had matured.

The proposal was too small for the industrial problem it attempted to solve. Its founders were also trying to build the legal framework while the crisis was already unfolding.

But the underlying premise survived every failed ownership plan that followed:

Saab’s most durable asset was not held by GM, Spyker, NEVS, or the bankruptcy estate. It was distributed among the people who continued to maintain the cars, the knowledge, and the international network after the company itself was gone.

For several days in February 2009, three men at a Dresden dealership attempted to place a financial value on that network.

They did not buy Saab.

They did, however, recognize what would keep it visible for the next fifteen years.